{"id":149058,"date":"2022-10-28T20:23:07","date_gmt":"2022-10-29T01:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/brightest-ever-space-explosion-reveals-possible-hints-of-dark-matter"},"modified":"2022-10-28T20:23:07","modified_gmt":"2022-10-29T01:23:07","slug":"brightest-ever-space-explosion-reveals-possible-hints-of-dark-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/brightest-ever-space-explosion-reveals-possible-hints-of-dark-matter","title":{"rendered":"Brightest-Ever Space Explosion Reveals Possible Hints of Dark Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/brightest-ever-space-explosion-reveals-possible-hints-of-dark-matter.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>O.o!!<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>On Sunday, October 9, <a href=\"https:\/\/science.gsfc.nasa.gov\/sed\/bio\/judith.racusin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" class=\"\">Judith Racusin<\/a> was 35,000 feet in the air, en route to a high-energy astrophysics conference, when the biggest cosmic explosion in history took place. \u201cI landed, looked at my phone, and had dozens of messages,\u201d said Racusin, an astrophysicist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. \u201cIt was really exceptional.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The explosion was a long gamma-ray burst, a cosmic event where a massive dying star unleashes powerful jets of energy as it collapses into a black hole or neutron star. This particular burst was so bright that it oversaturated the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, an orbiting NASA telescope designed in part to observe such events. \u201cThere were so many photons per second that they couldn\u2019t keep up,\u201d said <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ru.nl\/en\/people\/levan-a\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" class=\"\">Andrew Levan<\/a>, an astrophysicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. The burst even appears to have caused Earth\u2019s ionosphere, the upper layer of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, to <a href=\"https:\/\/gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov\/gcn3\/32744.gcn3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">swell in size<\/a> for several hours. \u201cThe fact you can change Earth\u2019s ionosphere from an object halfway across the universe is pretty incredible,\u201d said <a href=\"https:\/\/physics.mcmaster.ca\/~welch\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Doug Welch<\/a>, an astronomer at McMaster University in Canada.<\/p>\n<p>Astronomers cheekily called it the BOAT\u2014\u201cbrightest of all time\u201d\u2014and began to squeeze it for information about gamma-ray bursts and the cosmos more generally. \u201cEven 10 years from now there\u2019ll be new understanding from this data set,\u201d said <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lsu.edu\/physics\/people\/faculty\/burns_e.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" class=\"\">Eric Burns<\/a>, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University. \u201cIt still hasn\u2019t quite hit me that this really happened.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>O.o!! On Sunday, October 9, Judith Racusin was 35,000 feet in the air, en route to a high-energy astrophysics conference, when the biggest cosmic explosion in history took place. \u201cI landed, looked at my phone, and had dozens of messages,\u201d said Racusin, an astrophysicist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. \u201cIt was really [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1512,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-mobile-phones","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}